To do is to be (Kant)

To be is to do (Neitsche)

Do be do be do (Sinatra)

So goes the undergraduate joke. But whatever these three famous philosophers may or may not have said, the joke reveals something important about collaboration. To be a collaborator requires us to do collaboration. And to do collaboration we must be collaborative.

Or to put it another way, authentic collaboration requires us to both think and act like a collaborator.

So far so obvious. And yet I see many organisations professing to do collaboration without having recognised the requirement to be different. And so they:

  • Get their stakeholders in the room but retain control over key aspects of the conversation, such as the scope, the problem to be solved, who is invited, what data are relevant, who’s voice is heard, and so on.
  • Ask for feedback in the name of collaboration, when they are more accurately consulting.
  • Reserve the right to ignore or downplay collective decisions.
  • Send the (often mostly female) customer engagement team out to ‘collaborate’, while retaining decision-making powers within the (often mostly male) ‘core Divisions’ of the business.

Authentic collaboration requires a shift in mindset as much as it does a shift in practice. Or to paraphrase our three philosophers: Real collaboration with real people on real problems requires us to do and be and do and be and do collaboration.

So does your organisation strive to be collaborative in order to do collaboration?